HD View is a technology developed by Microsoft Research specifically for the purpose of viewing and interacting with large scale images on the web. As the HD Team describes it, it’s a “camera for the web.” But really what it does is allow you to interact with large, panoramic images that don’t fit…

The Microsoft Research Summit showed off some amazing new technology and also some REALLY fun games. The experts at the University of Central Florida have created multiple ways to incorporate the motion sensing device used with Nintendo's Wii, on the PC. Take a look at all the games...

At the 9th annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft's External Research Division, revealed some new tools for improving the process of doing research. The tools consist of a set of free software programs that let researchers and scholars seamlessly…

Just when you thought the Surface was the coolest thing since sliced bread... enter the Sphere! This product is still in proto-type mode but even at this stage, you can't help but be impressed. At the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit I grabbed some one on one time with Hrvoje Benko, the lead on…

mPlatform is a Microsoft Research project led by Feng Zhao, a principal researcher in the Networked Embedded Computing group within Microsoft Research Redmond. In 2006, he co-authored a paper along with Bodhi Priyantha, a researcher in Zhao’s group on something called mPlatform, which is basically…

Fresh from Microsoft’s Research Group comes a new IE7 plug-in called SearchTogether, which lets you browse the web with your friends. With SearchTogether, groups can chat while they search and annotate the results with comments and ratings via a thumbs up / thumbs down button. The plug-in can also…

MapCruncher is a Microsoft Research project which uses the Virtual Earth API to import entire supplemental maps into Virtual Earth. By supplemental maps, they mean any drawn-to-scale maps you can find, be they bicycle maps, transit maps, national park maps, university maps, or antique city maps,…

Writing music used to take years of experience, but not anymore. With MySong, a Microsoft Research Project, you can sing into a microphone and the software will automatically generates instrumental accompaniment for your song. As you sing, MySong chooses chords to match your melody, so you can write…

18 months ago, House Calls for Healthcare Professionals showed viewers something from Microsoft Research called “Play Anywhere”; a technology that allowed users to manipulate images projected on a table with nothing more than their hands. That technology has since been commercialized and is now…

Not only are these dancing robots adorable and fun to play with, but they are also a research tool. The BeatBots team joined forces with Hideki Kozima to study how children, specifically children with autism, interact and communicate. In a world with so much stimuli coming at us non-stop, the…